5Rhythms® with Christopher Boylan
5 Rhythms practice: we are all dancers
It’s all a dance. The swirl of galaxies in space. The orbital dances of planets around the stars. The dance of the moon around the earth. The dances of the tides and the seasons. The dance of our breath. The dance of the blood in our veins. The dance of the molecules in every cell of our bodies. The dance of atoms in the molecules. The dance of electrons around the atomic nucleus.
Everything moves in rhythms, patterns and waves. You, me and everyone else are no different. We are all dancers in a bigger dance. Somewhere along the way we lost our sense of place. We lost touch with the rhythms of existence and began to live a half-life in our heads instead of a full life with our bodies. 5 Rhythms is a simple movement technology that brings us home. Back into our bodies, back to our roots. With roots, we can find expression, we can let go of the things that hold us back, we can re-create ourselves and find our place in the web of being.
Ecstasy is nothing more than presence, a state of being truly alive and truly aware. All we have to do is move!
Gabrielle Roth identified, named and explored the qualities of movement that she found in her own dance and over many thousands of hours offering movement work on the dancefloor. We call these ways of moving the 5 Rhythms: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness. When we move with them in sequence, they form a wave of liberation. They are the basis for interconnected maps that comprise an ever-developing practice. It is a movement medicine wheel. Everyone who has ever danced 5 Rhythms (and many who haven’t!) have helped developed those maps.
5 Rhythms is about finding your own dance. The simple practice is there to help us. There are no steps or routines to learn. The dance doesn’t care how you look. The dance doesn’t care if you have a six-pack or a pie-belly. The dance doesn’t care about “getting it right”. The dance just IS. 5 Rhythms is freedom in motion. Get on down!
